User talk:J xadi

Plans
In intended "to do" order.

Rewrite New Player Guide
The new player guide is out of date and doesn't present information in an order that is helpful for a player just starting and struggling. Going to totally scrap the page and start over.

(ok, that;s actually an aweful lot of work to do in text format and include all the relevant information, and kind of time constrained. will come back to this later on)

oxygen guide
Just as out of date as the new player guide, especially when it comes to the mid/late game electrolyser setups (wheezewarts). Combine with SPOMs page?

--J xadi (talk) 14:44, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

Introduction
(what the guide includes, and why. our assumptions about setup {terra, default difficulties on everything, give seed used for images?}) Welcome to the new player guide for Oxygen Not Included. The aim of this guide is to give you a path to follow in the early game in establishing your first base, without running into many of the pitfalls and complications that can kill your base (and potentially your enjoyment of the game).

A lot of this information is based off the playstyle and videos of a youtuber called Francis John, who also has a series of tutorial videos for anyone who prefers that format.

This guide is intended to be used on Survival game mode, default game settings, and a Terra map. A lot of this will be applicable to other maps, but the ways in which it departs (lots of non Terra maps do not have accessible algae early) make the start significantly more challenging. If you wish to play on the exact map used for this guide the worldgen seed is SNDST-A-683320205-0.

Before Planetfall: Selecting your Duplicates
(what we are looking for in our starting three dupes, what to avoid) You've got your settings set, hit start, (some) Oxygen has been included and Space Adventure Awaits. Now you've got to pick your starting duplicants.

Your starting duplicants (dupes from now on) significantly effect how quick your colony gets off the ground, and good selections here will prevent many problems down the line. Fortunately we can reroll our starting selection until we have good selections.

You want to have two Diggers with Excavation +7, a Researcher with +7 Research, and none of these traits: Loud Sleeper, Bottomless Stomach, Mouth Breather, Anemic, Flatulent, Slow Learner, Narcoleptic. Stress and Joy reactions don't matter, positive traits don't matter.

The gist is that you are going to be doing a lot of digging, both generally through the course of the game and especially right at the beginning to get the space and resources you need to set up. Each point of Excavation gives you +25% digging speed, so our pair of +7 diggers have the same digging power as 5.5 dupes with no points in Excavation. Your ability to get key research done quickly is also essential to getting a colony out of the danger zone, and a +7 researcher gets that done almost four times as quickly. All the named traits do bad things that are hard to avoid: Loud Sleeper stops dupes from sleeping next to each other, Bottomless Stomach and Mouth Breather increase resource consumption, Anemic makes you slower, and so on. Stress and Joy reactions don't have much of an impact (you shouldn't accumulate any stress, and the joy ones are all pretty minor). The positive traits are potentially very strong (mole hands and quick learner are great), but you could also spend ages trying to roll for the perfect setup and you don't need perfection.

See Duplicant for more details about the effects of each stat and trait, and Selecting Duplicants for when and why you might want to deviate from the above.

When you're happy with the selections and the name of your colony, hit Embark.

The First Three Cycles
(starting situation, introduction to map. initial priorities and utilities) (Image, starting situation. Good water (six pockets), but poor metal locations. Caustic biomes showing at bottom left and right of screen) As you load into the map you get shown a boilerplate message about being in the wrong location. Dismiss it, and pause the game (spacebar, or the pause icon in the top left side). Zoom out, have a look around. See if you can spot any other Biomes (different terrain theme) like Caustic (pockets of chlorine or hydrogen) or Slime (polluted water, slime). Find all your nearby sources of water, look for nearby metal tiles. Our base is going to be built around a big vertical corridor close to the printing pod, so where can that go where it's not going to pile straight into pockets of water or hostile biomes.

Our initial priorities are establishing toilets, sinks, beds, research, and oxygen, in that order.
 * Toilets and sinks first because "accidents" spread polluted water around the base and cause trouble, and we need sinks to control the food poisoning germs from toilets. This also means we need a pitcher pump in water to feed the sinks.
 * Beds next, because while dupes recover stamina almost as fast without beds, they get an athletics debuff that makes them move slower.
 * Research and initial power third because we want to get to researching important technology quickly.
 * Oxygen fourth because you can survive off oxylite tiles and oxygen pockets until now, but we need something to fix this going forward so we can expand freely.

When you are ready to go, create a couple of dig commands towards the top of the closest water pocket, then unpause. As our dupes start excavating building options will open up for us, and we can start to place them down, beginning with a pitcher pump, two toilets, and two sinks. You will want to extend your central shaft down beyond your lowest floor a little bit so any CO2 that gets into your base will pool there rather then somewhere important. Once the toilet facilities are in drop down beds anywhere that is not next to the printing pod, as the light there will stop your dupes from sleeping. Finally when the beds are in research and oxygen can be placed. You will need to create a space seven tiles wide for a research station, manual generator (generate power for the research and oxygen), two batteries(so our dupes don't have to run all the time), and a oxygen diffuser, then tie them all together with wires. All these will require metal, in this map copper ore (the shiny, orange/brown tiles), so if you need to take a detour in your excavation to get some then do so. (image. Starting Toilets, Sinks, Pump, and Beds all laid out. Expansion planned both up (towards the metal deposits) and down (to form a sink for any CO2). My research facilities are going to go in the space to the right of the pod as soon as I get enough metal.)

The little things
While our initial digging is happening we can take the time to set up our work priorities and schedule, as well as a few other minor tasks to make life easier.

Find your starting ration box (yellow box with a red button on top), select it, and make sure "All" is selected. This will mean all our food sources gets collected into a central location. Open the Priorities window from the top of your screen. Tasks are done in priority order, so by adjusting this we can get our dupes doing the tasks they are best at first. Turn the Research priority of our researcher up to "very high" and everyone else to "disallowed" (only our researcher will research). Turn the Digging and Building priorities of our diggers to "high" and the researcher to "low" (our diggers will dig and build first, and our researcher will handle everything else in the base while there is no research happening). When you get more dupes later on you will want to do similar things for their unique skills (farmers to farming priority, ranchers to ranching, cook to cooking). (insert schedule stuff here)

Learning Stuff
(early research goals)

When you first open up the research tab it can look a little daunting at first, but there is pretty much a set order that you almost always open the game with as it provides you with the tools you need to get through the early game: Food, Power, Plumping, better Research, and the Great Hall. Usually in that order.

Up till now we have been running on our starting food and any muckroot we have dug up, in fact you might well be up on calories at this point because of how much digging you're doing, however eventually that will run out. We need some where to plant crops, Mealwood specifically, to keep us going in the mid term. To do this we want to unlock the Meal Preparation tech, which also gives us part one of making a Great Hall. Researching this first is recommended as it takes time for mealwood to grow.

Currently our power generation takes a dupe running, which occupies a lot of time. Moving over to Coal burning via the Internal Combustion tech will save our dupes loads of time, as they will only need to fill up the generator every few cycles (and we will stick in loads of batteries to save more fuel and time).

The starting toilets and sinks are also labour intensive to empty, so moving over to plumed versions via the Sanitation tech is useful.

Eventually we will need to get a Super Computer via the Advanced Research tech to carry on researching things, so best to slot it in now. The water cooler is also part two of making a Great Hall.

Finally, we need a decoration to make a Great Hall, one of the best early game moral boosts (which you need to improve your dupe's skills). We can get this via a flower pot, and the Internal Decor tech.

Growing our Base
(selecting new dupes, expanding our facilities into more permanent installations, getting early moral bonuses {great hall}, starting a more sustainable food supply)

Cycle 3 is important as as 14:00 you get your first Printing Pod choice. Open it up and click "choose a blueprint". You will be presented with a range of new duplicants to chose from, and sometimes some other options if you don't want to take a dupe on offer. For the first print though you really do want to pick up someone unless they all have crippling negatives as it adds a third more labour to your base. See Selecting Duplicants for more information as to what to pick, but here we picked Harold, a Buff Operator/Rancher with minimal downsides, who is going to be our first handyman and potentially a rancher if better dupes don't show up. Soon as they pop in, go to priorities and turn down digging and construction, along with research, and they will then cover all the other labour needed in the base.

At this point you want to be planing out the locations of your first permanent bathrooms, bedrooms, and great hall. Preferably close to each other so your dupes spend minimal time running around. One good way of doing this is sticking bedrooms on one side of your main ladder and the bathrooms and great hall on the other side, one above the other.

Running Water and Avoiding Suffocation
(plumbed toilets and sinks, dealing with waste water and dirt. CO2 removal)

Breaking Out
(expanding beyond the starting biome, things to watch out for

The SPOM
(why it's so good, how to build a little one)

Into the Mid Game
(guide conclusions, intermediate goals {steel, plastic, exosuits} and long term projects {industry and power bricks, harnessing vents, mega projects like petroleum boilers, SPACE!})

Oxygen Guide
(intro)

TL;DR
If you're just starting out on terra, dump down a bunch of oxygen diffusers plugged into your main grid to start with. Once you've taken care of other essentials such as food, water, fuel, and have sufficient tech and space, build "two by four" SPOM (link here). The SPOM will cover oxygen for up to ten dupes, if you need more then build another.

Yes, there are lots of other things you can do, and on other maps you will need to do other things, but sticking to just these two methods and this single SPOM design keeps things as close to foolproof as you can get in this game.